How Evolution shapes your thoughts

There is more than one way to answer the question, ‘what is coaching?’ But most coaches agree that coaching is about supporting and enabling the process of change and self-improvement. The way in which the coach achieves this effect might be different, but it will usually involve a combination of listening, asking questions, sharing insights and providing a different perspective on the challenges faced by an individual.

Coaches are often required to get underneath the surface to understand what makes an individual tick. They will ask questions that explore an individual’s relationship with the past and how they perceive themselves. Often these questions will help an individual realise how patterns of behaviour are shaped by their experience.

The problem with this approach is that the focus is on an individual’s experience, the role that their environment and their relationships have played on the way they think, feel and behave.

What about the other part of the equation? What impact has evolution (nature) had on the body and the brain and how does it impact our behaviour in the modern world?

In an earlier article, I wrote about the exponential changes that the human race has been through in the past 200 years. I wrote about three inventions that we take for granted (light bulb, car, modern diet) and the impact they are having on our bodies.

The disconnect between ‘the design and the environment’ is easy to understand when you consider the body. But what about the brain? If the body hasn’t significantly evolved over the past 50,000 years, it stands to reason that the brain won’t have evolved either.

People often shrug their shoulders when asked whether or not a behaviour is the result of nature or the environment (nurture). There seems to be a resigned acceptance that it’s impossible to tell which one contributes to human behaviour and to what extent. Whilst I don’t think it’s easy to draw a clear line between the two, I do think you can isolate some behaviours and attribute them to one or the other.

For example, if we remove environment from the equation, we can look at things that humans are commonly scared of. What scares people in the developed western world as much as it scares people in rural Africa?

Snakes and spiders are cited as common human fears, irrespective of environment. Charles Darwin stated in 1877, ‘May we not suspect that the… fears of children, which are quite independent of experience, are the inherited effects of real dangers… during ancient savage time?’ Humans are far more likely to develop fears from their ancestral environment rather than the dangers of their current environment. Cars and cigarettes kill far more people in the modern world yet people are rarely scared of these things.

Our commonly shared fears are like evolutionary programmes running in our brains. They’ve been useful in keeping our ancestors safe but they’re anachronistic, programmes useful for a world we no longer inhabit.

What other evolutionary programmes shape our behaviour in the modern world?

The Disease Avoidance Hypothesis

There are certain things that we find disgusting. Disgust is a very powerful human emotion and it’s extremely useful because it keeps us safe from disease and sickness. When you open a bottle of milk and give it a sniff, if it’s gone-off you might find yourself suddenly recoiling, physically moving away from the bottle as you feel a brief sense of nausea. You’re certainly likely to avoid it in the future. That sense you feel is a driven by an evolutionary programme. It kept your ancestors away from rotting meat and prevented them getting sick. There is a hypothesis (The Embryo Protection Hypothesis) that argues that this is the reason women get ‘morning sickness’ in their first trimester. Although the term sickness might imply that something is wrong, the hypothesis argues that the exact opposite is happening. The adaption is designed to prevent the mother from consuming and absorbing toxins which might harm the embryo. It is believed that this is one of the reasons humans like spices. The antimicrobial hypothesis argues that our taste has evolved to favour spices because they kill or inhibit the growth of micro-organisms and prevent the production of toxins in the food we eat.

Evolutionary Psychology is not without its controversy. There are many people that believe that gender is a social construct and that men and women are biologically the same, their behaviour has just been adapted by the roles we play in the society that we’ve created. Evolutionary psychology provides no evidence to support this argument which will lead some people to find it controversial.

Challenges of Parenting and Kinship

When a human baby is born, there is little doubt that the woman that gave birth to it is the baby’s mother. For fathers, there is always an element of ‘paternity uncertainty’. Investing energy and time raising the child of another man is a disaster from an evolutionary perspective so it’s conceivable that men have evolved psychological mechanisms to determine whether or not he is the father of the child.

A study in 1982 hypothesised that when a child is born mothers should be motivated to reinforce paternity certainty by remarking that the ‘child looks like their father’. The study secured 111 video tapes  of US births. The verbal statements were recorded with 68 making reference to the babies appearance. Chance alone would dictate that 50% of the babies would look like their mothers and 50% would look like their fathers.  However, when remarks on who the baby looked like were recorded, the mother’s remarks about the babies resemblance to the father were four times more frequent. Sample remarks included, ‘it looks like you, feels like you, just like daddy.’

In a second study by the same scientists, a questionnaire was sent to 526 new parents. When asked who the baby resembled, 81% indicated that child resembled the father as opposed to the mother. This study has been replicated in cultures in both Mexico and Canada.

The paternity uncertainty problem continues through to grandparents. Based on the paternity uncertainty theory, the mother’s mother can be most confident that the grandchild she has is part of her genetic kin. She gave birth to her daughter and she will be confident that her daughter’s daughter is her direct descendant. The theory argues that this confidence declines for the other grandparents. The maternal grandmother can be most confident, followed by the maternal grandfather, then the paternal mother, then the paternal father. The father’s father, faces twice the risk that the grandchild is not his.

Now consider which grandparent you were closest to growing up? A study in 1995 in the US surveyed 120 graduates on how close they were to their grandparents. How much time did they spend with them? How well did they know them? How close did they feel to them? How much resource (gifts etc) did they share with them? There was a strong correlation that demonstrated that the maternal grandmother was the closest relationship whilst the paternal grandfather was the most distant. 120 people isn’t the largest study in this area but it is worth considering. To what extent are the relationships with people in your family shaped by their confidence in whether or not you are a genetic relation?

Violence and Aggression

In 1974, a group of Chimpanzees in Tanzania formed a fighting party and travelled south out of their usual range. They moved silently with stealth followed by a researcher called Hillali Matama.

They came across a young male chimpanzee feasting on the ripe fruit of a tree. This young chimpanzee was known to the researchers. His name was Godi and he usually travelled with other chimps but today he was alone.

By the time Godi saw the others, they’d already got to his tree. He made a dash to get away but one the chasers caught him and pinned him down. With Godi’s face pushed into the ground, the other attackers screamed, beat, bit and struck Godi. After ten minutes they left, leaving Godi for dead with more than a dozen bleeding wounds. The researchers never saw Godi again. Although he didn’t die immediately from the attack, chances are that he didn’t survive more than a few days.

The attack was remarkable for its viciousness and the coordinated manner in which the other chimps attacked. It was also the first time that researchers had witnessed chimpanzees raiding another territory with deadly intent. It led them to question this long-held assumption that primates are peaceful and harmonious whilst humans kill their own kind.

Men and women both have the capacity to be aggressive. What is interesting is how they demonstrate aggression. From an evolutionary perspective, females need to initiate a long-term bond with a high-status male. But in order to maintain her mate’s loyalty, she must fend off competitors for her mate’s resources and protection.

In a study of derogation of competitors, women engaged in verbal aggression just as much as the men did. What was notable was the content of the derogation.  Women derogated their rivals on the basis of their appearance and sexual promiscuity. In 2009, a study indicated that when a particularly attractive woman slated the appearance of a rival, the men’s evaluation of the rival’s attractiveness were significantly influenced in a negative direction. The way in which we compete and insult each other is to some extent driven by our evolutionary programmes.

Men are more inclined towards violence. They are more likely to be the perpetrators of violence and the victims of violence. From an evolutionary perspective, men are likely to have adapted specific mental programmes that equip them for combat. Studies by Aaron Sell show that people are able to accurately assess a man’s strength (measured objectively thorough weightlifting) from pictures of a man’s body. They could even estimate a man’s upper body strength from pictures of his face. People were much less accurate at assessing a woman’s strength though.

The ability to be able to assess the strength of a male is very useful as it provides critical information on a potential adversaries fighting capability versus your own. Chances are that your ancestors made accurate predictions, long enough to procreate. The ones that didn’t were killed possibly because they entered fights that they did not win.

In the next article, I am going to talk about the role of dominance hierarchies, status and prestige as well as the role of honour and cheater detection strategies. All of these are driven by evolution and impact the way we think and behave in the modern world. Hopefully these articles will cast some light on an area of psychology that we are only just starting to discover and as coaches or leaders, you find useful insights that support your understanding of how people think and behave.

If this subject interests you, I strongly recommend ‘Evolutionary Psychology’ by David Buss. All points in this article have originated from his material.